Jane Eyre Third Edition Norton Critical Editions

The text reprinted in this new edition is that of the 1848 third edition text--the last text corrected by the author. "Contexts" includes eighteen new selections and two new subsections: "Charlotte and Jane’s Illustrated Book" which includes a letter from Brontë to her publisher W. S. Williams; "Vignettes from Bewick"; and "Charlotte Brontë and Bewick’s "British Birds’" and "Charlotte Brontë as Governess," which includes letters to Emily Brontë, Ellen Nussey, W. S. Williams, and "The Governess-Grinders." "Criticism" collects six major essays on Jane Eyre, four of them new to the Third Edition. Contributors include Adrienne Rich, Sandra M. Gilbert, Jerome Beaty, Lisa Sternlieb, Jeffrey Sconce, and Donna Marie Nudd. A new Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

"The Brontës' gifted biographer provides us with another superlative Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. For the classroom and for the general reader, there's no better way to experience the context in which Jane Eyre was written, illuminating modern commentary, and the novel itself in an authoritative text."—Fred Kaplan, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York This Norton Critical Edition includes: -The third-edition text (1848), the last corrected by Charlotte Brontë, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory footnotes. -"Contexts," highlighting Jane Eyre as a bildungsroman through diary entries and letters by the author about her experiences as a student, teacher, and governess as well as her feelings about friendship, love, and writing. -Five major critical interpretations by Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Susan Meyer, Carla Kaplan, and Kelly A. Marsh. -A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography

"The Brontës' gifted biographer provides us with another superlative Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. For the classroom and for the general reader, there's no better way to experience the context in which Jane Eyre was written, illuminating modern commentary, and the novel itself in an authoritative text."—Fred Kaplan, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York This Norton Critical Edition includes: -The third-edition text (1848), the last corrected by Charlotte Brontë, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory footnotes. -"Contexts," highlighting Jane Eyre as a bildungsroman through diary entries and letters by the author about her experiences as a student, teacher, and governess as well as her feelings about friendship, love, and writing. -Five major critical interpretations by Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Susan Meyer, Carla Kaplan, and Kelly A. Marsh. -A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography

The authoritative text reprinted in this volume is the third edition, published in 1848 (the last edition corrected by Charlotte Bronte). The notes to the text pay particular attention to literary and Biblical allusions and to words and phrases not readily available in desk dictionaries. They also include translation of French passages. The backgrounds section of this Norton Critical Edition offers generous samplings of Charlotte Bronte's early writings, letters, and poems. It also included pertinent passages from Mrs. Gaskell's biography as well as a sampling from the children magazine The Children's Friend, demonstrating a particular kind of oppression Jane Eyre suffered.

The LitJoy Classics edition of Jane Eyre features a fully illustrated cover and interior end pages, five full-page illustrations, gold-color ribbon, custom slip cover, gilded gold page edges, and artwork by Felix Abel Klaer.

One of the finest novels ever written, Jane Eyre is also one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of world literature.Whereas most modern teaching of the text misreads or misinterprets Charlotte Brontë’s devout and profoundly ingrained Christian faith and intentions, this critical edition emphasizes the semi-autobiographical dimension of the novel, exposing feminist critiques of the work as being woefully awry and illustrating Brontë’s belief in the hard-earned, hard-learned blessings of sanctity and reverence.

Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people's homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess, observed Jane Austen in Emma, was to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever." However, in an ironic paradox, the governess, so marginal to her society, was central to its fiction-partly because governessing was the fate of some exceptionally talented women who later wrote novels based on their experiences. But personal experience was only one source, and writers like Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, and Jane Austen all recognized that the governess's solitary figure, adrift in the world, offered more novelistic scope than did the constrained and respectable wife. Ruth Brandon weaves literary and social history with details from the lives of actual governesses, drawn from their letters and journals, to craft a rare portrait of real women whose lives were in stark contrast to the romantic tales of their fictional counterparts. Governess will resonate with the many fans of Jane Austen and the Brontës, whose novels continue to inspire films and books, as well as fans of The Nanny Diaries and other books that explore the longstanding tension between mothers and the women they hire to raise their children.

Modern Library editions include new Introductions by well-known contemporary authors, extensive biographical notes, and a reader's guide.